Moving on now to Safari 4, which is shipping from Apple (AAPL) today for Leopard, Tiger, AND Windows … Safari 4 offers unsurpassed speed for HTML and Javascript. It’s also Acid3 compliant. Safari 4 is 100 percent compliant as opposed to IE, which is 21 percent compliant. Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant and 40 percent faster than its predecessors.

Also featured in Snow Leopard, live previews of documents and movies — you can actually page through a document or view a movie directly from the dock. Dock Expose seems like a very nice feature, allowing app-specific controls, zooming, and workflow across applications. Safari now offers full history search and full Spotlight text search of that history. Safari also monitors Top Sites and notifies a user when they’ve been updated.

And now on to Quicktime. It features a new UI with disappearing controls. Quicktime also features in-video timelines and the ability to perform basic edits and shares to YouTube, iTunes, etc.

Serlet talks about all the improvements in technology we’ve seen in computers of the past few years and how new software is necessary to properly take advantage of them. In order to do this, Snow Leopard will run all major applications in 64-bit mode. That will make it substantially faster. Also speeding things up, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), a new system-wide technology that manages threads across multi-cores (if I’m understanding this correctly). GCD will increase performance and responsiveness.

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

AllThingsD by Writer

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources. Read more »